Long Views
Interview with Francis Tseng
Lead independent researcher at the Jain Family Institute Designer & developer Co-founder of Public Science collective
What does your ideal world look like in 50 years, 100 years, or beyond? Do you have any sense of capitalism’s role in this future? What do you think the world would look like if capitalism were to be systematically dismantled?
I hope that we will have abolished capitalism within 50 years, or at least made substantial strides towards that goal. Because capitalism shapes so much of the world and our daily lives, many things would look very different. We would probably work less, and find it more fulfilling. In terms of our group (the professional working class) there would be less tolerance for busywork, workaholism for the sake of career advancement, all the kinds of mental and physical health issues that occur because of overwork. We’d have more control over our lives and time to do things for pleasure and relaxation. When we did work, we would know why we’re doing it and the benefits would be clear. It wouldn’t be because a boss was telling us to, it wouldn’t be because we feared being fired and losing our livelihood.
Elsewhere, it would mean more autonomy for people. They would have more direct control over everything that impacts their lives. People’s right to live wouldn’t be tied to their ability to find a job. Peasants in other countries wouldn’t have to worry about their land being taken from them by multinational countries and towns wouldn’t have to worry about foreign mining companies polluting their air and water. Instead of police we would have people who actually addressed underlying issues. When decisions are made, they would involve all affected people and could be done not on the basis of profitability but considering the whole spectrum of impacts: social, environmental, etc.
How might civilization be driven by cooperation rather than competition?
I think civilization is already mostly driven by cooperation. Competition probably hampers progress more than anything else. We spend more of our time working with other people than competing with them. If we are concerned with improvements in quality of life everywhere, we’d want to share technical developments, offer aid and technical assistance, but that often doesn’t happen because of competition. I guess the argument for competition is that it drives innovation. Maybe that happens sometimes, but innovation driven by competition is more likely to be harmful (it may externalize its negative impacts, such as environmental ones, onto someone else). Better innovation is driven through cooperation—people have a problem that affects them and they are motivated to solve it not only for themselves but for others who are also affected. I encounter that motivation far more than I do competition.
What types of roles, activities, or work do you see as essential in a better future?
I think care work and agriculture will have a much bigger role in a better future. They are already very important, but in the case of care work, often not recognized as important or overlooked, and agriculture right now is managed by a relatively small amount of people and ecologically devastating. Ideally care work is better and more equally distributed, and that would definitely be made easier if people have to work less in general.
Agriculture becomes more important if we want to move away from extractive industries (fossil fuels, metals, etc). The economy will have to rely more on biomass, i.e. growing things (for example, we want to rely less on concrete because it emits so much carbon and probably replace it with timber…forestry is typically considered separately from agriculture but I’m kind of lumping it in here). Agriculture is already one of the primary human activities on the planet, and the way industrial agriculture works means it is one of the biggest contributors to all ecological problems. So we need to do it in a more sustainable way—and there is a tremendous amount of existing knowledge (traditional and Indigenous) to help with that (broadly grouped under the term “agroecology”).
I don’t think this means we are all going to become farmers or anything like that. More of us will probably engage in farming, but that might look very different than what farming looks like today. This might mean more of us grow food forests, or community urban gardens, or have small plots in backyards or on rooftops. People enjoy taking care of plants and taking care of plants that also feed you is even more rewarding!
Do you have any thoughts on automation?
On the left automation is often seen as a key part of a viable transition to a post-capitalist society. This is an old idea—in his analysis of capitalism, Marx argued that capitalism was very good at technological innovation and productivity improvements, and that this would actually be its downfall (it would automated workers out of jobs, who then have no money to continue the consumption that capitalism requires, and you can’t extract surplus value out of machines, only human labor, leading to a crisis of profitability). Nowadays automation is used on the left more to counter fears about austerity and poverty under historical communist regimes…this is the whole idea behind “fully automated luxury communism”, i.e. ours is a communism in which you can have basically anything you want.
Of course labor-saving technologies are great, but sometimes this automation is treated as if it were an unambiguous good. A lot of these technologies have tremendous ecological impact (e.g. mining for the materials, energy for the operation, etc). The machines themselves would still need to be maintained, repaired, upgraded, etc. Maybe it would be possible to automate those in the future but I doubt that that could happen for a very long time. And technology in general is often developed for militaristic purposes or to undermine worker control and autonomy or for profitability, so there’s a broader question there if many of these technologies can be fully separated from those original applications.
For example, there is work in robotics now on automating elderly care. Hiring people for elderly care is expensive and in places like Japan the elderly population is proportionally large enough that it is hard to find caretakers. But most of us would probably agree that a robot will not be able to provide the same level of care, attention, and connection necessary for a good experience. That’s probably a kind of automation we wouldn’t want to include in our future.
That all being said I think automation has an important role to play, because a lot of work is drudgery and the less we have to do of it, the better. We just need to be conscious that automation isn’t “free”—it has material and energy requirements and can negatively influence power relations, so that we can carefully decide if a particular kind of automation is worth it.
How do you think people should govern themselves? How might a utopian civilization collectively plan for their future?
People should have a direct say in issues that affect them. This sounds difficult to pull off—there are 350 million people in the US and many things affect all of them. But it’s only difficult because of the way the state and law are set up—that one law decided in DC then affects everyone in the US. There are some proposals around this idea of “bioregionalism”, where legislative boundaries conform more to geographical systems, e.g. all residents of a watershed might convene together to make decisions, because they are all impacted by the watershed. In general, most of the decisions that affect us are small in scale, and that becomes truer if, for example, food systems are scaled down, so in practice these problems of scale will be infrequent.